Their total population is only five billion.
It seems my angel wants to become a student of animal life here on Earth. I, her teacher! But bless her for the notion anyhow. We sat and traded animals for a couple of hours last night; I found it restful, after the mental struggle to grasp more difficult matters. Judy was something new to her. They have several luscious monsters on that planet, but, in her view, so have we.
She told me of a blue sea-snake fifty feet long, relatively harmless, that bellows cowlike and comes into the tidal marshes to lay black eggs; so I gave her a whale. She offered a bat-winged, day-flying ball of mammalian fluff as big as my head and weighing under an ounce; I matched her with a marmoset. She tried me with a small-size pink brontosaur, very rare, but I was ready with the duck-billed platypus, and that caused us to exchange some pretty funny remarks about mammalian eggs. All trivial in a way; also the happiest evening in my fifty-three tangled years of life.
She was a trifle hesitant to explain those kangaroolike people, until she was sure I really wanted to know. It seems they are about the nearest parallel to human life on that planet; not a near parallel, of course, as she was careful to explain. Agreeable and always friendly souls, though they weren't always so, I'm sure, and of a somewhat more alert intelligence than we possess. Manual workers mainly, because they prefer it nowadays, but some of them are excellent mathematicians. The first practical spaceship was built by a group of them, with assistance, of course.
Names offer a difficulty. Because of the nature of the angelic language, they have scant use for them except for the purpose of written record, and writing naturally plays little part in their daily life—no occasion to write a letter when distance is no obstacle to the speech of your mind. An angel's formal name is about as important to him, as, say, my Social Security number is to me.
She has not told me hers, because my mind can't grasp the phonetics on which their written language is based. As we would speak a friend's name, an angel will project the friend's image to his friend's receiving mind. More pleasant and more intimate, I think, although it was a shock to me at first to glimpse my own ugly mug in my mind's eye.
Stories are occasionally written, if there is something in them that should be preserved precisely as it was in the first telling. But in their world the true story-teller has a more important place than the printer. He offers one of the best of their quieter pleasures; a good one can hold his audience for a week and never tire them.
"What is this 'angel' in your mind when you think of me?" she asked once.
"A being men have imagined for centuries, when they thought of themselves as they might like to be, and not as they are."